Oracle Approvals Management (AME) lets you build routing rules for document approvals expense reports. The integration between Internet Expenses and Oracle Approvals Management lets you establish expense report approval rules based on header or lines information. Approval rules let you automatically route expense approvals to cost center owners, cost center business managers, project managers or award managers. You can also set approval rules to control the escalation of expense reports for policy violations.
When Oracle Approvals Management is enabled, the expense report workflow process uses the Oracle Approvals Management definition in place of the Find Approver Method of the Find Approver function in the Internet Expenses application. In addition, the signing limits of the Verify Authority function are ignored. See also: Chapter 7, Defining Workflow Processes, page 7-1.
The OIE Expense Reports transaction type is seeded with attributes beyond those provided by Oracle Approvals Management, to support the approval rules. In addition, all mandatory and non-mandatory attributes provided by Oracle Approvals
Management, as well as the attributes provided by Internet Expenses, are seeded with default behaviors based on typical customer requirements.
For more information about Oracle Approvals Management, refer to Oracle Approvals Management Implementation Guide.
Overview of the Routing Process
When an expense report is submitted, Approvals Management creates an approval chain based on the approval rules. This approval chain is followed until the expense report has been approved by all managers in the approvals chain. This approval authority is determined by the routing rules and conditions that you have defined. If Internet Expenses cannot find an approver, the expense report is routed to the workflow administrator.
If an approver transfers ownership of the expense report to another approver, the new approver is qualified by the same routing rules. The approval chain again is followed for this approver escalating the expense report as necessary until an approver with the
appropriate authority approves it. If an expense report is rejected, when it is submitted again, the expense report is routed directly to the approver who rejected it.
If you have set the Level of Manager Involvement client extension to either Bypass Approval or Notification Only, the expense report is automatically approved and issues notifications of the approval as appropriate. See also: Management Involvement Procedure (DetermineMgrInvolvement), page 5-7.
When expenses are split into multiple distributions, different approvals might be required from different approval authorities. For example, an expense report could be split between two cost centers. In this case, two approval chains can be followed for each cost center approver. See: Reviewing and Approving Expense Allocations With AME, page 3-47.
Parallel Approvals. You can have approvals take place in parallel to shorten the approvals process time. For example, if an expense report requires approval from 2 different project managers, then the requests for approval can be sent simultaneously and the approvals can be performed in parallel. The approval process is complete when all the approvers have approved the expense report.
Note: Parallel approvals are dependent on the order number. Header level approvals with the order number 1 must be complete before other approvals commence.
FYI Notifications. You can specify FYI approvers who will receive a notification describing the transaction. Their approval is not required for the approval process to be completed.
Aggregation of Amounts. When expenses are split into multiple distributions, separate approvals might be required from different approval authorities. For example, an expense report could be split between two cost centers. In this case, two approval chains can be followed for each cost center approver. Additionally, approvals can occur based on an aggregate amount per cost center. See: Reviewing and Approving Expense Allocations With Oracle Approvals Management, page 3-47.
Setting Up Approval Rules
To set up approval rules for your company:
1. Set the AME: Installed profile option to Yes at the application level for Oracle Payables.
Warning: If the AME: Installed profile option is set to Yes and Oracle Approvals Management is not installed, the expense report processing will fail during the Find Approver function of the Expense Report workflow process.
managers. You can define cost center owners, cost center business managers, grants managers or project managers as default approvers. You can define default
approval managers for routing according to line level or header information.
Cost Center Owners - Define cost center owners in Oracle Human Resources.
Cost Center Business Managers - Define cost center business managers in Oracle Human Resources.
1. Navigate to the Oracle HRMS Descriptive Flexfields Segments window.
2. Query the Add'l Organization Information Segment Title.
3. Define the Code value. For consistency with the cost center owners flexfield, it is recommended to define the code value as Organization Name Alias.
4. In the Segments window, define at least one segment for the business manager's name. To validate the manager names, select
HR_COST_CENTER_MANAGER as the value set for the segment.
5. Complete the flexfield setup and click Compile.
6. In the Organization window, query the organization that you want.
7. For the Company Cost Center classification, click Others and select Reporting Information.
8. In the Additional Organization Information window, enter the business manager information in the flexfield.
Project Managers - Define Project managers in Oracle Projects. See Project Teams and Team Roles, Oracle Projects Fundamentals User Guide.
3. Define job levels. If you are not using approval rules that use a job-level based approval type you can skip this step. See: Defining a Job, Using Oracle HRMS - The Fundamentals for more information.
4. Define conditions. Conditions are used by Oracle Approvals Management to determine which rules apply to a transaction. See the Oracle Approvals Management Implementation Guide for more information.
5. Define one or more approval routing rules in Oracle Approvals Management.
For approvals of expense allocations, you can define approval rules in two ways:
• Based on expense allocation distributions. For example, if a single expense is charged to multiple cost centers, you can define rules so that each cost center owner must approve the amounts charged to their own cost center.
• Based on total amounts charged. For example, you can define an approval rule based on the total amount charged to a cost center.
6. Define parallel approvals. If you require approvals to occur in parallel, use the AME Administrator responsibility to set up the parallelization mode.
See the Oracle Approvals Management Implementation Guide to set up and enable parallelization at the levels in which parallelization is required.
Note: Before enabling parallel approvals, see: Determining
"In-Process" Expense Reports Before Enabling Parallel Approvals, OracleMetaLink Note 391996.1.
7. Create FYI notifications.
• If you do not require a response to a notification, then set the Configuration Variable allowFyiNotifications toYes.
• For each rule that requires an FYI notification, set the category to For Your Information.
Note: You must run the Workflow Background Process whenever you use the FYI Notifications.
See the Oracle Approvals Management Implementation Guide.
8. Optionally, you can modify the approver client extensions.